The best advice for any organization choosing to upgrade or newly acquire a CRM
deployment would be to put considerable effort into thinking the
project through and writing it out into project form. For a new CRM acquisition, consider these tips.
“1) The objectives for the project, in other words what benefits you wish the CRM
system to deliver for the organization. 2) The identification of the
key supporting business processes that will drive achievement of the
objectives. 3) The detailed data and functional requirements necessary
to drive the defined business processes.” – What a CRM consultant would tell you about buying CRM software.
For the mission of upgrading and extending
the current install, the same crucial first step is required of
establishing the desired outcomes. The general goal is always to
maximize the utility of your entire computing environment to your
business processes. Then you have to determine the optimal development
path.
“For instance, you may uncover a collection of key
business processes that are duplicated by several applications. This
may lead you to investigate how to retire the overlapping systems
without negatively impacting the rest of the portfolio. Or you may find
that a key process that would make an ideal candidate for SOA enablement is deeply intertwined in an existing application.” – The Four Steps of Enterprise Application Modernization
Remember also that upgrading the system is
never really a finished step in terms of the company’s business:
maintaining applications on an ongoing basis is part of the value
equation with all software. You want to know how far into the future
this particular development is likely to carry you, and what are the
resource costs to go beyond that horizon? What happens when the
business needs of the company change? How agile is the proposed system?
The
financial services industry is in strong development activity at this
time, because of the large business opportunities presented from being
able to broaden the range of offerings to customers. CRM,
and the “intentional customer experience”, as Amdocs calls it, are
important concerns for banks, for example. Banks are heavily dependent
on customer loyalty, and on differentiating themselves to up-sell an
increasingly complete range of financial products to their customers.
This industry views service oriented architecture (SOA) as:
“[...] a means of updating IT capabilities ‘at a reasonable cost and with minimal disruption.’ The SOA
approach can extend the life of legacy systems and actually look at
them as though they were new investments. Many capabilities exist
within legacy application silos that can potentially be used elsewhere
in the context of SOA. Also, by divorcing business rules from back-end processes, SOA eliminates dependencies and reduces the need for duplication of effort.” See SOA Gives Legacy Apps New Legs
The architecture is enabling the financial
services industry to develop greater business agility with incremental
stages and costs, and at the same time applications vendors are adding
more detailed business process rules to products to help agents
cross-sell and up-sell products and services.
“Integrating their multiple channels is a longtime
goal of banks that will not only cut costs but make them more
responsive to their customers, says an IBM executive. Banks are still in the early stages of SOA,
using it to cut down on redundancies and streamline processes within
individual business units. The next step, says a Tower Group analyst,
is to expand the approach to create “a common platform of data.”
Starting small is OK, though, because it improves the odds of success,
says the CTO of a banking services and software provider. Banks Are Early Adopter of SOA
SOA tends to be
slightly abstract to business managers accustomed to monolithic-stack
computing capability. Executive sponsorship of this architecture is
universally cited as being crucial to its successful adoption.
“By now, we have clear business examples, [but]
upfront you don’t have those. You need to sell [users] on the idea, and
you need an executive sponsor, preferably the CIO, who really buys into it and knows how to sell it to the business.” – SOA Projects Need To Be Systematic, Exec Says
Similar advantages accrue to the enterprise with an Amdocs Clarify™ CRM system, upon upgrading to Dovetail CRM.
Affordable acquisition cost, dramatic net cost savings, incremental
addition or replacement, flexible architecture, processes exposed as
services, open standards, and the .NET platform for long-term
development certainty. Beyond all this, Dovetail is created for a
seamless integration with the Clarify database, with thin-client
applications that have identical look and feel to the Amdocs
applications.
